1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for manufacturing a multilayer electronic component that includes a layered product having a plurality of sheets. More particularly, the present invention relates to an improvement in the method of obtaining the layered product, which is included in the electronic component, and an apparatus thereof.
2. Description of the Background Art
Multilayer electronic components typically include multilayer ceramic electronic components, such as a multilayer ceramic capacitor, a multilayer ceramic substrate, a multilayer varistor, a multilayer piezoelectric element, and the like. In addition to the multilayer ceramic electronic components, multilayer electronic components include multilayer film electronic components, such as a multilayer film capacitor, which is made of an organic film.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open Application No. 1-226131 (1989) describes a method of manufacturing a multilayer ceramic electronic component. This prior art reference teaches the steps of forming patterned electrodes on a carrier film and forming a ceramic green sheet thereon so that the electrodes are embedded in the ceramic green sheet. The method further comprises the steps of thermocompression bonding the ceramic green sheet onto another ceramic green sheet or onto electrodes formed on another ceramic green sheet, and then separating the carrier film, thereby transferring the former ceramic green sheet onto the latter ceramic green sheet.
However, when the thickness of the ceramic green sheets, which are used in the multilayer ceramic capacitor, is reduced and the number of layers of the ceramic green sheets increased, so as to increase the capacitance and to reduce the size of the multilayer ceramic capacitor, the multilayer ceramic capacitors, which are obtained by the aforementioned prior art method, have certain drawbacks. For example, the internal electrodes are often extremely misaligned, in relation to each other, as a result of pressurization of the ceramic green sheets. FIG. 7 shows an example of such misalignment of the internal electrodes, in which, ceramic green sheets 1 provided with internal electrodes 2 are shown stacked on each other. When such misalignment occurs, the internal electrodes 2 could be improperly exposed in a later cutting step, or the multilayer ceramic capacitor formed could have insufficient capacitance.